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Why do bat viruses keep infecting people?

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"Eby, a wildlife ecologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, is looking for lactating females and their newborn pups, but the overcast weather is keeping them snuggled under their mothers’ wings. Eby has been studying flying foxes, a type of bat, for some 25 years. Using her binoculars, she tallies the number of lactating females that are close to weaning their young — a proxy for whether the bats are experiencing nutritional stress and so probably more likely to shed viruses that can make people ill. Australian flying foxes are of interest because they host a virus called Hendra, which causes a very rare but deadly respiratory infection that kills one in every two infected people. Hendra virus, like Nipah, SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic) is a bat virus that has spilled over into people. These viruses often reach humans through an intermediate animal, sometimes with deadly consequences. Scientists know that spillovers are associated with habitat loss, but have struggled to pinpoint the specific conditions that spark events until now. Specifically, the researchers found that clusters of Hendra virus spillovers occur following years in which the bats experience food stress. And these food shortages typically follow years with a strong El Niño, a climatic phenomenon in the tropical Pacific Ocean that is often associated with drought along eastern Australia. But if the trees the bats rely on for food during the winter have a large flowering event the year after there’s been a food shortage, there are no spillovers. Unfortunately, the problem is that “there’s hardly any winter habitat left”, says Raina Plowright, a disease ecologist and study co-author at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York." 11/20/22 Read the full article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03682-9

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nature